Sticky Kisses

by Greg Johnson

Abby rolled her eyes in her old, girlish way, reassuring him. “Sure. Like I have time for that.”

  He offered to help, and after returning from Lucille’s room with the empty tray—Thom still didn’t dare to go in there—and hurrying off to grade a few more papers, Thom cleaned up the kitchen and then made a “to do” list for the rest of the day. The yard needed mowing, and last night he’d noticed a stack of unopened bills on his mother’s rolltop desk in the den; he could sort through those, write out the checks, and have Abby take them in for Lucille’s signature. Then he’d go to Kroger’s and buy groceries. He added a few more items to the list, aware that he’d begun feeling better. The list looked so neat and orderly; it would guide him through the day. But before starting the first chore, he went back to check on his father.

  The room was dark and close-smelling, the blinds drawn. To Thorn’s surprise, his father was sitting up, propped by pillows, glancing around the room with the mechanical alertness of a bird. His sleep-mussed whitish hair and purse-lipped mouth seemed oddly birdlike, too, and Thom edged into the room, not wanting to startle him.

  “Hey, Daddy,” he said.

  On the other side of the bed, the day nurse—a stocky, unsmiling woman whose thick glasses cruelly magnified her dark, popping eyes—stood fiddling with some items on a tray table. She was lifting the foil wrapper off a container of ready-made pudding. Neither she nor Thorn’s father had even acknowledged his presence. The nurse kept her dark gaze lowered as his father’s glance flitted about the room.

  “Why don’t you take a break?” Thom said. “I can feed him.”

  He joined the nurse on the other side of the bed; she hesitated a moment, then handed him the pudding and spoon.

  “Just a tiny bit each time,” she said. “Otherwise he’ll spit it out.” Her huge eyes blinked behind her glasses, seeming to focus just past his shoulder. “I guess I should check on your mother. Abby said she’s not feeling well.”

  “She’s fine, she’s just resting,” Thom said quickly. “Why don’t you take an hour off? Go have some lunch.”

  The nurse looked offended. “He’ll probably eat a third of that, if you’re lucky.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ll be back,” she said.

  Despite the constant movement of his father’s head, Thom managed little by little to feed him. He would hold out the spoon with its dab of vanilla pudding, his hand trembling, and his father’s head would swivel in that direction, his lips parted like a communicant’s—just enough for Thom to slip the spoon inside. His father’s stubbled jaws made a chewing motion, and Thom was ready with a napkin, touching at the tiny spots of pudding that oozed from each side of his father’s mouth. Then he put down the napkin and took up the spoon again. A kind of rhythm was established, soothing Thorn’s nerves. Clearly, his father no longer had the capacity to recognize him or anyone, but somehow that didn’t matter. Thom felt how his shoulders and arms had relaxed, as though someone had massaged them. He took deep, slow breaths, in rhythm with his father’s feeding. The surrounding room was so dim and quiet, Thom thought, they might be anywhere—disembodied, out of time. Thorn’s eyes had grown moist; they stung pleasantly. He dabbed at them with the same pudding-stained napkin he’d used for his father. That’s when he heard the ruckus starting up, somewhere behind him: his mother, followed by the nurse and a bewildered-looking Abby, had blundered into the room.

  “What are you doing?” Lucille cried. She’d just woken up, Thom saw. Her eyes were puffy, and her dark-tinted reddish hair stood in angry tufts about her head. “Mrs. Phillips is supposed to do that.”

  Lucille grabbed the pudding cup and spoon out of Thorn’s hand and dropped them onto the tray.

  She stood there, breathing fast. Abby and the nurse appeared too shocked to speak, and Thom had nothing to say. Did his mother want him to wait here, docile on the edge of the bed, while she screamed at him? Did she still want him to drive her to the airport, so she could catch the plane for Jackie Kennedy’s funeral? Whatever she wanted, he thought calmly, he would oblige.

  Now she looked shame-faced; she went to the opposite side of the bed and fiddled with the blanket, bunching it around her husband’s waist.

  She said, “You can’t feed him too much—the doctor told us that. He throws up all the time, just like a little baby….” Her face had started to crumple.

  “It’s just some pudding,” Thom said. “He seems to like it.” He added, “He seems happy, in fact.”

  He glanced at his father who was, indeed, happily oblivious to the scene playing out before him.

  Lucille had put the tips of her fingers against her forehead, in an attitude of woe. Tears slid freely out both sides of her eyes, but when she looked up, her voice was amazingly steady and her eyes held a malevolent glare.

  “What do you know about it? Happy? You think he’s happy? Are you happy now, Thomas Sadler. Are you?”

  “Mommy, stop it.” Abby had stepped forward and clamped one arm around her mother’s shoulders. “Be quiet,” she said sternly. “There’s no point in blaming Thom.”

  But Lucille kept glaring at him—there was a point, and she would not relinquish it—while Thom stared back with his new calmness, which must have struck the others as defiance, or simple indifference.

  “Are you happy?” Lucille repeated.

  Thom stood, sighing. He gave Abby a rueful smile. He was always doing this—leaving his sister to clean up. “Guess I’d better shove off,” he said, to no one in particular.

  And no one answered. The nurse had looked around at all of them, her eyes like blurry dark wounds behind her glasses.

  “Should I feed him the rest of that pudding?” she asked.

  And so it happened that Thomas Jefferson Sadler did not attend his father’s funeral. The morning after his mother’s outburst, Abby called him at 7:12; he would always remember the time, for he’d awakened to the shrilling phone. The blaring red numerals on his digital clock had seared the moment into his memory. Abby told her brother in a subdued, almost apologetic voice that their father had died in his sleep.

  Thom blinked, staring at the clock. Now it was 7:13. “OK, I’ll be right over.”

  “Thom?” Abby said. She’d sounded fearful. “Thom, could you wait a little while?”

  That’s when he knew: Lucille was determined to blame him. After an awkward pause, Abby acknowledged that his mother, for the moment, had forbidden him from the house, adding quickly that she was being “irrational,” that she would certainly “come around.” But Abby’s voice held little conviction: its fearful, girlish apprehension was something else he would never forget.

  They talked for a few more minutes, and Thom insisted that he could make phone calls, at least, so that Abby could cope with Lucille. “Oh Thom, thanks so much,” Abby breathed out. “That’s a great idea.”

  Another long, awkward silence. Thom felt the question hovering between them. “You don’t blame me, do you? Abby?”

  But he didn’t dare ask. He didn’t want the answer.

  So Thom made phone calls: the funeral home, his mother’s favorite priest from Christ the King, a handful of far-flung relatives around the country. Only to Father Reilly—a bluff, barrel-chested man he’d met a few times and disliked—did Thom mention that he might not be attending the funeral. Family conflicts, he muttered. The priest said he’d spoken to Lucille often in the past few months and that he understood. He seemed eager to get off the phone.

  You understand? Understand what? Thom didn’t ask.

  “During the eulogy, I could say that you’re indisposed,” Father Reilly said awkwardly.

  “Thanks,” Thom said, feeling a pang of sympathy for the man. “That’s probably for the best.”

  Early on the morning of the service, which was scheduled for two o’clock, Thom slipped into the funeral home. He’d hurried into the same jeans and pullover he’d worn the previous day; he hadn’t bathed or shaved. Although Lucille had not “come around,” Abby told Thom that an early-morning visit would
be safe: she and Lucille had stayed with the body late the night before, receiving a steady stream of visitors. Whenever anyone had inquired after Thom, Abby reported, Lucille told them Thom was sick and then pointedly changed the subject.

  Now a sleepy-looking man appeared in the dim, high-ceilinged hall and stared at Thom, blinking.

  “Sadler?” Thom said. The man gestured quickly to a door on his left and wandered off. Thom went inside. He saw the opened visitors’ book with its long list of signatures, but of course he didn’t sign. The casket was opened, and his father, dressed in one of his gray banker’s suits, looked no different from the sleeping man Thom had watched over these past few weeks. Standing here, Thom felt a little sleepy, himself. The night before, he’d drifted off while watching one of the endless documentaries about the Kennedy family that had been broadcast since Jackie Kennedy’s death the previous week. The familiar clips from JFK’s funeral had been replayed, and Thom had stared balefully at Jackie in her black veil, holding her children’s hands—Caroline and little John-John in their tailored woolen coats. He’d seen the film countless times, of course, but despite his exhaustion he forced himself to watch it again, his eyes aching as that little boy, urged gently by his mother, stepped forward the moment his father’s coffin passed by. Thom had closed his eyes when the scene shifted, or had a commercial come on?—he couldn’t remember. And this morning, raffish and inconsequent above his own father, he felt that same drowsiness, almost a numbness, spreading through him like a drug. He waited a minute or two before knowing that he couldn’t shed a proper tear, much less imagine some noble gesture—Thom Sadler’s belated version of that tiny, perfect salute.

  Chapter 3

  Abby had almost backed out of attending the party that forever changed her life.

  This perhaps melodramatic thought would haunt her in the months to come, and the more she lectured herself, in her brisk schoolteacher’s voice, and in clichéd terms she would have marked in red on a student’s paper—What’s done is done; hindsight is 20/20—the more her thoughts wound back to that night, to the benefit for that organization whose name she could never keep straight.

  Gays against violence, stopping violence against gays—something like that.

  Nor had she wanted, that same day, to have lunch with Thom and his friend Connie Lefcourt; she claimed she had phone calls to make. Their mother started to fret, Abby told her brother, if she hadn’t called by noon with a “progress report” on Thom and a few minutes of repetitive chatter about their plans for Sunday afternoon. Lucille had decided not to meet them at the airport, after all, but to make a brunch reservation at the Four Seasons hotel. The hotel provided shuttle service from the airport, so she would meet her children in the pretentious gilt-decorated lobby with its gargantuan chandeliers and its majestic staircase sweeping upward into the realm of thousand-dollar-a-night suites. And, though Abby didn’t mention this, she needed to call Valerie Patten, too. The carefully worded suicide note from Valerie’s husband had worried her all week, like a pebble in her shoe. Logically considered, the letter had no value to anyone: Valerie had already read the contents, and of course Marty, if he were still alive, had no need of it. Abby wondered at her own motives: was she simply prying? Of course, she wanted to know what had happened. Valerie’s husband had gone through with his threat, or he was not dead but had injured himself critically (with a gunshot, with a car rammed into a tree), or he had used emotional blackmail to persuade Valerie to come back to him…or did the story have some other, unimaginable outcome? The letter seemed a lingering token of her own deceit and uncertainty, the cloud of unexamined emotion in which she’d returned to Atlanta.

  She wanted clarity. She wanted knowledge. A couple of days ago, while Thom was out showing one of his listings, she’d opened the top drawer of her brother’s night table, lugged out one of the phone books, and found a listing—thankfully, there was only one—for “Luttrell, Martin,” with an address in Druid Hills. Of course, she should simply copy down the address and return the letter, as she’d originally planned, but instead she’d lifted the receiver and dialed.

  To her dismay, a woman had answered on the first ring. “Hello? Hello?”

  The voice was unmistakable. Abby hung up.

  Panicked, she took a few deep breaths. It was 11:30 in the morning, a weekday; she’d expected no one would be home. She would hear Marty Luttrell’s recorded greeting and know that all was well. Since then, the pebble in her shoe had seemed larger, sharper. Yes, as her mother would say, confession is good for the soul and she’d decided to call again, tell Valerie she had taken the letter, apologize, and ask if she wanted it returned. If Valerie’s husband had carried out his threat, which Abby doubted, then of course she would offer to talk with the woman, even to visit her; she remembered Valerie saying she had no real friends in Atlanta. Given what Abby had done, she was perhaps the last person Valerie would want to see, but nonetheless she’d make the call. When she left Atlanta this time—for the last time?—she wanted to feel that she’d met her obligations, snipped every loose thread.

  Once Thom had returned from walking the dogs, rubbing his hands together briskly, and reminded her about lunch with Connie, she closed the newspaper—she’d been sitting at the dining room table, paging through the paper but not reading it—and told him she’d decided not to go.

  “What?” Thom said, with the boyish frown he used when something impeded him. “Why not?”

  When she told him, in a deliberately vague, offhand way, that she had phone calls to make, Thom said, “Come on, honey, can’t they wait until we get back? Connie will be so disappointed.”

  “Thom, I—”

  “He called the other night, you know, after you’d gone to bed, and was raving about how nice and smart and pretty you are. He was an only child, you know, and he’s always wanted a sister. Or so he claims. He’d probably like to spirit you away.”

  Earlier in the week Thom had cooked dinner for Abby, Connie, and Carter; he’d also invited Warren, Connie’s roommate. Thom wore an apron that read “Kiss the Cook”—everyone did, of course—and had exercised his natural flair as a host. Carter had seemed to feel better than on that first afternoon, and had eaten generous portions of Thorn’s Caesar salad and crab cakes, and the apple-raspberry pie Thom had made from scratch. Warren was a slender, boyish-looking psychologist, with a Kennedy-like shock of thick auburn hair and a shy but ready smile; and the much-heralded Connie, after introducing himself a bit pompously as “Constantine Lefcourt, Jr.,” had relaxed during his first minutes of intensive chatting with Abby and had become, after his second glass of Merlot, quite witty and garrulous. He dominated the talk but not offensively, occasionally bringing Carter or Warren into his monologue while staying focused on Abby, insisting he wanted to hear everything about her and Thorn’s life when they were growing up, yet never really giving her the chance: he was too busy talking about his own life.

  Connie was a tall, imposing man, blond and fair-skinned, dressed exquisitely in a turquoise silk shirt (turquoise being Connie’s “trademark color,” Thom had said), slacks of pale gray wool, a glossy-black pair of tasseled loafers. He had referred, with a roll of his eyes, to his upcoming “dreaded fortieth birthday,” but his face was unlined, almost cherubic, and his cheeks flushed with pleasure as he chatted and sipped his wine. Though perhaps ten pounds overweight, he had vivid blue-green eyes, a strong nose, lips of an almost womanly thickness. Abby supposed he must have been spectacularly good-looking as a younger man. In fact, Thom had mentioned that Connie once “did some modeling” and was always, in the opinion of some, overdressed. Abby didn’t agree. She’d thought he looked wonderful, and he’d been quite entertaining. He’d talked virtually nonstop during their cocktails, and right through dinner, and then coffee and dessert in the living room; he was still talking as Thom and Abby accompanied him to the door. No one had seemed to mind.

  Abby gazed down at the closed newspaper. She took a breath. “I liked him too, Th
om. It isn’t that.”

  “And you’re leaving day after tomorrow, right?”

  He tried to turn the boyish, grumpy frown into a smile, but it was a pained and pleading smile.

  “Thom, I—”

  “And it seems like we haven’t done much of anything.”

  Yesterday, as she’d accompanied Thom to show one of his listings, he’d apologized for his laxness as a host, insisting that when people visited from out of town he liked to “entertain” them. He took them to the Botanical Gardens, or the Cyclorama. They’d visit the Margaret Mitchell house. They’d take the CNN tour. But since Abby had grown up here, he’d said with a grin, she posed a special challenge. She’d assured him that going around with Thom to visit his friends, show his listings, even tag along on his everyday errands, was all she wanted; she enjoyed learning what his life was like. He’d agreed, nodding vigorously, claiming he’d like to spend a few days with her in Philadelphia, too, sitting in on her classes, driving into Center City on weekends to visit the bookshops and art galleries she favored. As if fulfilling her half of their bargain, she’d gone with him yesterday to show a listing in Morningside, meeting another agent who insisted her client was close to making an offer. Abby’s eye had caught on the Remax “For Sale” sign in front of the house, with its white strip along the bottom that read THOMAS J. SADLER, AGENT, with his office and home phone numbers under that. Thom had mentioned that he’d “done well” these past couple of years, and Abby supposed it must be true. He had more than a dozen listings in the trendiest Atlanta neighborhoods, he’d said, with a boyish pride that Abby found touching. His listings—renovated houses, mostly, plus a few condos—were in Morningside, Virginia-Highland, Ansley Park. Most of the owners were gay men or lesbians, he’d said, but not all; he’d developed a substantial reputation throughout the in-town real estate community.

  Abby had trouble picturing Thom as a salesman. He’d always been so brash and outspoken. Patience had never been one of his virtues. She couldn’t imagine him giving tactful or evasive answers to skeptical queries about his listings (didn’t all real estate agents have to do this?) or negotiating detailed, fussy contracts with other brokers, real estate lawyers, temperamental clients. But only last night he’d insisted that he “loved real estate” because every day was a challenge and completely unpredictable.